Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity

200 Pages·2007·1.15 MB·English

by  Christopher Peterson

K i n d r e d
SPECTERS
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K i n d r e d
S P E C T E R S
Death, Mourning, and American Affinity
i
Christopher Peterson
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
Chapter 2 was previously published in Modern Fiction Studies52, no. 3 (fall 2006):
548–69; copyright 2006 The Johns Hopkins University Press; reprinted with
permission from The Johns Hopkins University Press. Chapter 3 was previously
published in CR: The New Centennial Review4, no. 1 (2004): 227–265; reprinted
with permission from Michigan State University Press.
Copyright 2007 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Peterson, Christopher, 1972–
Kindred specters : death, mourning, and American affinity /
Christopher Peterson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:978-0-8166-4983-9 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8166-4983-9 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN:978-0-8166-4984-6 (pb : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8166-4984-7 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Death in literature. 2. Mourning customs in literature.
3. Kinship in literature. I. Title.
PN56.D4P47 2007
810.9'3548—dc22 2007014351
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
12 11 10 09 08 07 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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On all sides are ghosts, not of the dead, but of living people.
—Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
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C o n t e n t s
Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction
1
1. Giving Up the Geist
37
2. Beloved’s Claim
68
3. The Haunted House of Kinship
97
4. The Kinship of Strangers; or, Beyond Affiliation
135
Notes
157
Index
183
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Acknowledgments
For an author who seeks to question the epistemological assumption
that allows us to distinguish kin from non-kin, to thank those kin who
contributed to the book’s completion is problematic, to say the least.
What does it mean to acknowledge one’s kin in the context of an argu-
ment that aims to show how knowledge of others is irremediably com-
promised by their alterity? How would I know whom to thank? How
does recognizing one’s collaborators necessarily entail the omission of
innumerable others that memory fails to capture? In what follows, I aim
to express my gratitude to all those who were kind enough to indulge
my turning the conversation to thoughts of ghosts and kinship during
the years that I spent researching and writing. If, as I argue in the pages
that follow, kinship is always implicated in a violent reduction of the
other to the same (kind), I hope that the following acknowledgments
commit only the least amount of violence that kinship requires.
This project was generously supported by grants from the Ah-
manson Foundation, the Marta Feuchtwanger Trust, and the Josephine
De Kármán Fellowship Trust. My parents, John Peterson and Linda
Hoffman-Peterson, as well as my siblings, Ann Peterson-Miller, Eliza-
beth Peterson, and Geoffrey Peterson, all showed much more than the
usual amount of interest and support that “blood” relationships are
said to require. Numerous friends were also invaluable to my work as
well as to my sanity. In particular, I thank Matthew Adler, Bradley
Youngston, Cindy Sarver, Christine Coffman, Peter Huk, Mark Hud-
son, Vinay Swamy, Gary Riley, Diana Anders, Luis Williams, Michelle
Peterson, Randy Colvin, Eric Anders, and Robert Byer. I also want to
thank those faculty at Northwestern University who inspired me as an
undergraduate to pursue the study of literature: Michal Ginsburg,
Françoise Lionnet, Jane Winston, and Helen Deustch.
ix
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